Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.
Alexander Pope. An Essay on Criticism.
Evelyn Nesbit, model and archetypical Gibson Girl, 1903.
And indeed, I'm likely foolish for bringing up this topic.
Model in overalls . Photos by Alfred Eisenstaedt, 1944. This is posted under the fair use and other exceptions. Life, by 1943, was already posting some fairly revealing photographs on its cover, but there was a certain line that it did not really cross until 1953, when it photographed the full nudes of Marilyn Monroe prior to Playboy doing so, in an act calculated to save her career, as it was a respectable magazine. The publication of nude Monroe's from the 1940s went, to use a modern term, "viral" both in Life and in Playboy showing something was afoot in the culture. This photo above shows how much things were still viewed differently mid World War Two, with a very demure model demonstrating work pants.
This post actually serves to link in a video posted below, which probably isn't apparent due to all of the introductory photographs and text. And that's because of all the commentary I've asserted along the way.
If you do nothing else, watch or listen to the video.
This post might look like a surprising thing to have linked in here, but in actuality, it directly applies to the topic of this website, the same being changes over time. Or, put another way, how did average people, more particularly average Americans, and more particularly still, average Wyomingites, look at things and experience things, as well as looked at things and experienced things.
This is an area in which views have changed radically, and Fr. Krupp's post really reveals that.
At some point, relatively early in this podcast, Fr. Krupp, quoting from Dr. Peter Craig, notes that what the Sexual Revolution did was subtract, not add, to sex, by taking out of it its fundamental reality, that being that it creates human beings.
That's a phenomenal observation.
And its correct. What the Sexual Revolution achieved was to completely divorce an elemental act from an existential reality, and in the process, it warped human understanding of it, and indeed infantilized it. That in turn lead, ultimately, the childish individualist focus on our reproductive organs we have today, and a massive focus on sex that has nothing whatsoever to do with reproduction, or at least we think it doesn't. It's been wholly destructive.
We've addressed that numerous times here in the past and if we have a quibble with the presentation, it would be a fairly minor one, maybe. Fr. Krupp puts this in the context of artificial birth control, but the process, we feel, had started earlier in the last 1940s with the erroneous conclusions in the Kinsey treatise Sexual Behavior in the Human Mail, which was drawn from prisoners who were available as they had not been conscripted to fight in World War Two and who displayed a variety of deviances, including sexual, to start with. The report was a bit of a bomb thrown into society, which was followed up upon by Hugh Hefner's slick publication Playboy which portrayed all women as sterile and top heavy. Pharmaceuticals pushed things over the edge in the early 60s.
Lauren Bacall, 1943.
The point isn't that prurient interests didn't exist before that time. They very clearly did. La Vie Parisienne was popular prior to World War Two for that very reason, and films, prior to the production code, were already experimenting with titillation by the 1920s. But there was much, much less of this prior to 1948 than there was later, and going the other direction, prior to 1920, it would have been pretty rare to have been exposed to such things in average life at all.
Indeed, it's now well known, in spite of what the Kinsey report claimed, that men and women acted very conventionally through the 40s. Most people, men and women, never had sex outside of marriage. Things did occur, including "unplanned births" but they were treated much differently and not regarded as the norm. Included in that, of course, was the knowledge that acting outside of marriage didn't keep things from occuring in the normal and conventional biological sense.
Given that, the normal male's view of the world, and for that matter the normal female's, was undoubtedly much different, and much less sexualized. Additionally, it would have been less deviant than even widely accepted deviances today, and much more grounded in biology. That doesn't mean things didn't happen, but they happened a lot less, and people were more realistic about what the consequences of what they were doing were in every sense.
Something started to change in the 1940s, and perhaps the Kinsey book was a symptom of that rather than the cause, although its very hard to tell. Indeed, as early as the 1920s the movie industry, before being reined in, made a very serious effort to sell through sex. It was society that reacted at the time, showing how ingrained the moral culture was. That really started to break down during the 1940s. I've often wondered if the war itself was part of the reason why.
From Reddit, again posted under copyright exceptions. This is definitely risque and its hard to imagine women doing in this in the 30s, and frankly its pretty hard to imagine them doing it in the 1940s, but here it is. The Second World War was a massive bloodletting, even worse than the Frist, and to some extent to me it seems like it shattered moral conduct in all sorts of ways, although it took some time to play out.
Kinsey released his book in 1948, and like SLAM Marshall's book Men Under Fire, its conclusions were in fact flat out wrong. Marshall's book impacted military training for decades and some still site it. Kinsey's book is still respected even though it contains material that's demonstratively wrong.
By 1953 (in the midst of a new war in Korea) things had slipped far enough that Hugh Hefner was able to introduce a slick publication glorifying women who were portrayed as over endowed, oversexed, dumb, and sterile. There were efforts to fight back, but they were losing efforts.
Cheesecake photograph of Marilyn Monroe (posted here under the fair use and commentary exceptions to copyright. This photograph must be from the late 1950s or the very early 1960s, which somewhat, but only somewhat, cuts against Fr. Krupp's argument, which is based on the works of Dr. Peter Craig and heavily tied to artificial birth control as the cause of the Sexual Revolution. I think that's largely correct, but the breakdown had started earlier, as early in 1948 in my view, such that even before the introduction of contraceptive pharmaceuticals a divorce between the reality of sex and reproduction had set in, leading to the "toy" or plaything concept of women that we have today.
And then the pill came, at the same time a society revolution of sorts, concentrated in young people, started to spread around the globe.
We've lost a lot here. A massive amount. And principal among them are our groundings in the existential, and reality. And we're still slippping.
QC: Human Sexuality | January 17, 2024.
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